Outpatient IR

[MRM8213]

Do outpatient IR jobs exist? i.e. port placements, biopsies, fibroid embos, vein treatments with minimal call/weekends?

I enjoy doing the smaller procedures and am considering IR but want good work/life balance and don't mind having a DR/IR mix. I am also considering MSK and body but pp is moving away from them doing procedures...

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[irwarrior]

Will be tough. There are outpatient IR practices, but you have to compete aggressively for these referrals and have to take pager call for your patients (almost concierge) to keep the patients and referrals happy. It takes at least 3 years to build it and the initial overhead is pretty high. There are numerous successful outpatient IR practices, but they are working pretty hard to get it going and you are likely going to work pretty hard initially to get it up and running. Often you need hospital privileges to enable you to run an outpatient lab and often the radiology groups may prevent you from getting privileges as they fear you may be competition.

Consider doing diagnostic imaging and then do a body imaging fellowship or MSK fellowship with procedures. Alternatively, women's imaging has a decent number of procedures. Hospital IR has a growing number of emergencies including PE, DVT,cold legs, GI bleeds, epistaxis, post surgical abscess drains, stroke therapy, urgent IVC filters etc.

 

[m3db01]

Despite the challenges in establishing an outpatient IR practice, my understanding is that this is a growing area of IR practice. From what I understand, the IR/DR residency and IR being seen as its own specialty further projects growth in outpatient IR. Multidisciplinary vascular groups that hire IR, cardiologists, vascular surgeons, etc. in outpatient practice are also further establishing. Can anyone comment if these notions are true?

 

[irwarrior]

The outpatient IR practice is definitely a growing part of IR. There are many vascular centers that see IR as a good partner due to the broad skill set they provide . A large amount of PAD interventions and dialysis interventions are being done in the outpatient labs. However, it will require a clinically aggressive and technically skilled interventional physician and this is essentially a 100 percent IR commitment with office hours, surgical days and need for aggressive marketing and practice development. But, for the motivated IR trainee this is potentially a great route, but it will still take a fair amount of hard work and effort.